A Studio That Didn’t Exist Four Years Ago Just Outsold Most Established Franchises

The Blood of Dawnwalker has sold more than 1 million copies within 48 hours of launch. Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco confirmed the milestone jointly on September 5. It’s a striking result for a brand-new studio releasing its first game with no existing fanbase to draw on.

A Fast Million for a Completely New IP

PC Games reports the dark fantasy vampire RPG reached its million-copy milestone roughly two days after launch. It released across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on September 3, with no platform-by-platform sales breakdown shared.

Steam activity backed up the sales figure. Gamer.org notes concurrent players peaked at 70,692 on September 5, with nearly 38,000 still playing the following morning.

Why This Studio’s Pedigree Mattered

Rebel Wolves, founded in 2022, built its reputation before shipping a single game. Studio head Konrad Tomaszkiewicz previously directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and worked as co-director on Cyberpunk 2077.

Team background: Key narrative and design leads, including Jakub Szamałek and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, are also CD Projekt Red veterans
Development scale: Bandai Namco says the project spent more than four years in development, growing the studio to around 160 people
Critical reception: The game holds an 84 on Metacritic for its PC version, with 83 percent of Steam user reviews rated positive

Shattered.io points out that score sits nine points behind The Witcher 3’s own 92. That’s the game Tomaszkiewicz is best known for directing. It’s a strong debut, not a genre-defining one.

What’s Actually Dividing Players

Reviews single out the story, atmosphere, and combat as the game’s strongest elements. That praise hasn’t come without complaints, though. Some players report dark, hard-to-see visuals and occasional crashes, while others report few technical issues at all.

The game’s time-limited structure has split opinion too. Coen, the protagonist, operates within a fixed 30-day cycle. That forces players to prioritize which storylines and characters they pursue, rather than seeing everything in one playthrough.

A Planned Saga, Not a One-Off

Rebel Wolves has said The Blood of Dawnwalker is meant to launch a much larger saga. Tomaszkiewicz has confirmed each future entry will function as a standalone story. The goal is avoiding cliffhangers or time-travel devices, keeping every installment self-contained.

Narrative director Jakub Szamałek has told fans to watch for subtle clues in this first game. Those details connect to the broader saga still to come.

Résultat final

An 84 Metacritic score won’t match The Witcher 3’s legacy-defining reception, and it doesn’t need to. For a completely new IP from a four-year-old studio, selling a million copies in two days is a rare outcome.

Whatever technical rough edges exist at launch, Rebel Wolves has clearly proven there’s a real audience for its next chapter.